Monday, June 22, 2015

A thought comes when IT wishes...

Varieties of Thinking
Experience

With regard to
the superstitions of
logicians , I shall never tire of emphasizing a
small, terse fact, which is unwillingly recognizedby these credulous minds—namely, that a thought comes when "it" wishes, and not when
"I" wish; so that it is a PERVERSION of the facts
of the case to say that the subject "I" is the
condition of the predicate "think." (Beyond Good and Evil)

This
opening sentence from a student's story sticks
in my
head as I drive to Shoe Barn for summer
sandals and now,
sitting on the back porch, I look at it.

It's
over 90 degrees. I
didn't read the story. .

I
taught waterskiing and sailing summers in late 50's and
later wrote a dissertationon Nathaniel Hawthorne. Ann
was cheerleader, homecoming queen,

valedictorian
and Phi Beta Kappa.

“Is not living
valuing,

preferring, being unjust,

being limited, endeavoring

to
be different?” (Beyond etc.)

Aunt
Harriet started the Civil War. Her brother Henry
auctioned off slaves to freedom from his

pulpit
in Brooklyn

Mother
packed clothes and shipped them
south toSwannanoa
and OldFarmSchool
--the train slowing

from
BlackMountain
so as to toss the bundles
before speeding
to Asheville.

When
my cousin''s husband got his head cut off by Auca Indians,
shetook their small blonde daughter

to live with them and spread the word of
Christ.

“We
believe that severity, violence, slavery, danger in the street andin the
heart, secrecy,
stoicism, tempter's
art and devilry of everykind,—that everything
wicked, terrible, tyrannical, predatory, and serpentine in man, serves as well for the
elevation of the
human species as its opposite”(N)

My
brother bumped into Libba Cotton in Baltimore, spending
an evening playing “Freight Train” and other songs from Chapel Hill
having walked away from college after hearing Joseph Spence one spring evening
in New Haven. He never
returned

My
first fall at Warren Wilson. Adeeb tossed a phone line
to his girlfriend's dorm. It hit a live wire and electrocuted
him. We named the soccer field after him.

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I choose, as a determining POINT in my life, to acknowledge a bullet fired into the armpit of my grandfather, Samuel Scoville, Jr. by athief in the night sometime in the late 19thc.

The thief escaped, my grandfather having pulled his own pistol from beneath the pillow,squeezing off a couple of rounds and sendingthe burglar scurrying into the Connecticut night...

For reasons offamily notoriety, the incident was reported in both New York and Philadelphia papers. A former roommate in Philly called up Young Goodman Sam, inviting him down for a weekend gala: The Yale-Penn Football game. “You can take my sister Katherine, and chaperone me and my fiancé, he said.

In those days couples were not advised to be alone. Unaccompanied.

Sam took a steam-driven locomotive train down toPhiladelphia, escorted Katherine to the leather-helmet contest, fell in love, asked her to marry him.She did & they lived more or less HAP-ily ever after, generating a tribe of offspring who like wise generated in kind so that if it hadn’t of been for that bullet, well, it’s impossible to begin to consider how unimaginably different life-as-we-know-itwould have been. No one can say.

For one thing: YOU, dear Reader, wouldn’t be reading THIS HERE right now, resurrecting these words to walk around in your skull-haus this very be-here-now moment. So even you are impacted forever by that bullet.

(I could drive up to Connecticut right now, retrieve the small bite of lead, drop it in your hand and remind you how co-incidental our life is—how inexplicable, how arbitrary & selective our accounts, how much we omit which is also absolutely necessary, how inadequate our because & affects.)

The bullet is a NECESSARY butINSUFFICIENT cause of who-I-am, without which any explanation would be incomplete. Sam Scoville